"From Yugoslavia to the Middle East to Central Asia, the fault lines of civilizations are the battle lines of the future." Samuel Huntington, Clash of Civilizations

Armed with fresh intelligence, the CIA is moving additional man power and equipment into Pakistan in the effort to find Osama bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri, according to U.S. officials.

Imagine that you could beam youself into a screening room in the secet warrens of the CIA. An assembled team of analysts are watching a real-time video filmed in the White Mountains of the Pakistan Tribal Region. It was taken from an unmanned Predator drone armed with two laser-targeted Hellfire missiles, and beamed back to the control team ten time zones away.

The drone was sent to destroy a small caravan believed to be made up of the Osama bin Laden and his entourage. The high-resolution, full-color film bursts to life, racing over a mountainous terrain bisected by a sheer-walled canyon. A caravan winds its way like a line of black ants alongside a blue ribbon of a river that snakes through the canyon floor. The sightless gaze of the Predator camera zooms in, bringing the ragged line of armed men, heavily laden donkeys and pack horses into life-sized focus. At the center of the thin line is a tall bearded male wearing a flowing white robe, black vest, and turban. An AK-47 was slung over his shoulder. The figure suddenly freezes in his tracks and looked up at the sky, shielding his eyes with his hand. In the next instant a missile fired from the drone explodes, vaporizing in a blinding flash from the sky what a moment before had been the string of trekkers.

Armed with fresh intelligence, the CIA is moving additional man power and equipment into Pakistan in the effort to find Osama bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al Zawahri, according to U.S. officials. We thought this would be a good time to re-publish a January Daily Galaxy post, Where in the World is Osama bin Laden.

With the end of the Cold War and 9/11, the threat of rising from the sands of the Middle East has been the flash point of what Harvard's Samuel Huntington has termed the "Clash of Civilizations" between Islam and the West. The term "Middle East" was originally coined by American naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan in 1902. During this time the British and Russian Empires were vying for influence in Central Asia, a rivalry with the Persian Gulf as the strategic center of what would become known as The Great Game, which continues, tragically, to this day under a different banner.

The interactive Map of War below vividly illustrates the great march of imperial history and warfare in the region from ancient times from Egyptians, Jews, Romans, Arabs, Persians, Turks to the Europeans.